Search form

Search form

Dell reported higher profits on lower revenues in the third quarter after shifting away from PCs to focus on more lucrative servers, networking equipment and services. The change reflects what founder and CEO Michael Dell says is the company's gradual transition away from consumer PCs to target small and midsized enterprises. Dell said the company has significantly increased research-and-development spending this year.

Related Summaries

The agency responsible for developing state-of-the-art technologies for the Defense Department is building a robot ostrich that is capable of running at almost 20 mph and also able to navigate rough terrain. DARPA's two-legged FastRunner robot is being developed in partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Robot Locomotion Group and will stand 4½ feet tall and weigh more than 60 pounds when complete.

The rogue coders who created the Trojan known as Duqu worked for more than four years on the project, according to an analysis by Kaspersky Lab that dated components of the malware to 2007. The analysis focused on a Duqu attack against a business in Sudan, using a false business opportunity to entice a user to open a Microsoft Word attachment containing an infected font file. Duqu first surfaced in Iran, but analysts say that country's official decision to conceal the attack most likely gave the Trojan's creators a chance to tweak the malware.

Amazon Web Services has introduced a cloud service that gives users access to a 16-core CPU, 60.5 gigabytes of RAM and 3.37 terabytes of storage. The service is designed to support applications such as physics simulations, genome analysis and aircraft design. The offering, called Cluster Compute Eight Extra Large, is in public beta and is available for Linux or Windows for $2.40 per hour.

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt says proposed government regulation over online copyright would increase Internet censorship and give greater power to law enforcement to shut down Internet access and websites. "The solutions are Draconian," Schmidt said. "There's a bill that would require [Internet service providers] to remove URLs from the Web, which is also known as censorship last time I checked."

The U.S. government is home to five of the top 10 supercomputers, but the top spot belongs to a Japanese system, the K computer. U.S. IT officials believe a supercomputer that is in development, called Titan, could take the top spot.